This piece
is an excerpt from one of Wilma Dykeman's novels entitled, "The Tall
Woman" (highly recommended!). The main character, Lydia McQueen,
wants to build a school for the children in her valley, but one of the
men in town, Ham Nelson, opposes the idea.

As a river is born deep inside
the earth in springs that gather into streams and join to become a river,
so people's lives gather into families and communities and become part
of the river of history.

In the story of Lydia McQueen,
a young woman in the mountains of Western North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee,
we follow the flow of her life from the destruction of Civil War, when
her family is divided as the nation is divided, through her efforts to
rebuild her family, establish a school, show friendship to outcasts as
well as the most powerful citizens in her community.

A meaningful scene in the novel
occurs when Lydia is cleaning leaves and debris from her cherished spring
and the village doctor brings her bad news.

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Lydia was down by her spring
the last day of January. The afternoon had been somewhat warmer
than usual and she had come to dip our any leave that might have blown
into the water since the last storm. She had brought along her hoe
to deepen the bed of the overflow stream that ran from the spring.
The smell of the wet leaves and the soaked ground and the chilly day gave
her a feeling of being under water, of drenched lungs and body.

When Dr. Hornsby rode into
the yard at the other end of the path and up the rise, she called to him.
She did not recognize who the visitor was until he dismounted and she
saw the heavy saddlebags across his panting horse. Before she could
get her hoe and start down the path he was striding toward her.

"And what are you doing this
bleak day on this godforsaken mountain?" he asked.

She laughed at the gloom of
his words, belied in part by the heartiness of his smile. "Cleaning my
spring."

"And pray tell me, Lydia McQueen,
"he said, "how do you clean a spring? Do you wash the water?"

"Don't be making fun of me!
There"- she pointed with the hoe- "look under the ledge where the roots
of those poplar trees are, and tell me if you ever set eyes on a bolder,
finer spring than that? Or a cleaner one?"

He went and looked. The
natural bowl of water, surrounded on three sides and overhead by a ledge
of rock and tangled web of roots and earth, stood clear and cold as glass.
Around the spring and beside the stream that flowed from if were beds
of moss and galax, a luxuriant winter green, and the vines of other carefully
preserved plants that bloomed in spring, were a dozen blackberry stalks.
There were no other briers or dead weeds or fallen limbs around this spot.
Someone had worked here lovingly and well.

"I never set eyes on a bolder,
finer spring, "he repeated. "Or a cleaner."

"This is my favorite place
on our farm," she said.

"Sometime," the doctor said
and he snapped the leaf off a galax plant with a sudden angry flick of
his switch, "just one time I wish I could bear you word of something good.
Now I've got other bad news."

She clutched the hoe.
"What?"

"Ham Nelson will fight you
on getting your school for Thickety Creek."

She waited for him to go on.

"Was that your news?"

He nodded and she threw back
her head and laughed. Her shawl came loose and her hair fell around
her shoulders. She laughed as though she could not stop.

"But I thought it meant so
much to you," he said stiffly. "I misjudged---"

"Oh, no!" She took a
step neared to him. "A school means everything to me. It's
just Ham Nelson that doesn't mean anything."

The doctor looked at her.
Laughter and sarcasm and amazement were mingled in his look. "Nelson's
a powerful man, " he said.

"The power of a rock," she
said.

"Then---"

"But there's something stronger
than a rock. You see that ledge over my spring? I've seen
it cracked by the stem of a little vine that had to come up to sunlight
through it. There nothing strong enough to stop for long the strength
of growing things. And children are stouter than any vines."

They walked to the yard.
He mounted his horse and sat for a moment looking down at her. "I'm
glad to have seen your fine spring of water, Lydia McQueen," he said.
He smiled down at her. "I'm glad to have seen you."

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It's all there: a universal
example of care for nature's bounty, care for future generations of neighbors,
and determination that a life-giving vision will overcome greed and neglect.
The adage, "A tall woman casts a long shadow," shows in Lydia that one
person casts a long shadow despite her too-short life.